Free Correcting the Landscape by Marjorie Kowalski Cole Page A

to stop.
    I traced the figures and found a drop in advertising sales. What the hell is this?
    In addition to writing for us, Gayle had followed up her advertising accounts, and a new kid from the journalism department, a Randy something, was supposedly hustling new ads. But this did not look good. By God, here was a little flurry of cancellations. What’s going on?
    I felt a childish panic, like when you step out a bit too far in the lake and the deep water is suddenly cold.
    In the spring we’d get twenty-five thousand from the borough for proofing and publishing the borough foreclosure list and distributing it with every copy and then some. That was our inexhaustible cow. We could certainly hold on. Look at all these bills that I could delay, just a bit, here and there, maybe overlap payments.
    Canceled advertising accounts—I’d rather see a bear in my driveway. Two restaurants, an insurance company, a furniture store, and an automobile alignment place that I knew to be rabidly right wing—maybe they were fed up with our political driftof late, however they saw it. I’d get on this Randy kid to see what’s up.
    I asked Gayle if she had any idea why they canceled. “‘We’ve come to believe that the paper is not what our customers read,’” she repeated. “That’s what the one fellow said. Do you want me to—”
    â€œOh, Gayle, no, you’re doing plenty.” I felt so strongly about this that my hand went out and gripped her bare forearm, briefly, and a shock went through me. It was just meant to be a gesture. But the palm of my hand was suddenly loaded with sensors: the warmth of her arm, the tendons, the hard oblique shape of it, the exact width from narrow to the wrist, widening toward the elbow—suddenly the palm of my hand took a reading that I could have used to find Gayle in a crowd.
    I removed my hand and looked at her. Her eyes, with that same light, deep inside, were as reserved and expectant as always. Yes, what is it , she could have been saying or thinking, nothing more. I didn’t know. I didn’t get the clues.
    The timber concessions bill passed the Alaska Senate and headed to the House, and the storm escalated. Gayle tallied the speakers at every public hearing, talked to the legislative information office, and told me that testimony was running five to one against this legislation; but the Republican senators remained convinced that a “silent majority” supported the bill.
    â€œNot a whole lot of thinking is going on down there,” Noreen raged. “There are not even any costs listed in this bill. What, do they expect it’s all gain, no expense whatsoever? Don’t they know the least thing about human nature?”
    â€œIt’s standard procedure to minimize the negative when it comes to a pet project,” I said, and thought, zero expense, all benefits: like Gus Traynor taking over the Mercury . “Even businessmen can forget about things, No. That’s human nature for you.”
    I’d forgotten about Dr. Leasure’s view, too, so one afternoon when Gayle and I left the Department of Natural Resources, after a public hearing, and headed back to the office, I was astounded to see the transformation that had taken place on the clear-cut since October. Dozens, maybe fifty or sixty, little tourist cabins, like fancy storage sheds, stood cheek by jowl on the spot. We couldn’t stop, but we stared from the highway bridge and I slowed the truck. Row after row of unfinished cabins sheathed in pink insulation were lined up from the highway access road down to the river’s edge. The lookout resembled nothing so much as an enlightened camp for migrant labor, a happy stop for road-weary travelers like those in The Grapes of Wrath .
    The setting sun turned the whole scene a creamy pink, the sunset and the insulation both casting something like alpenglow. How strange to see beauty in these